I almost hate to say it in the months before an election, because it sounds so ridiculous, but you win and lose elections many times based on the quality of your work in getting people to the polls - GOTV is what it is called - Get Out The Vote.
For months, we heard Republicans say that they would be able to match and exceed the efforts by Democrats to get extra votes in key swing states, but when the votes were counted, it was a victory for Democrats in important counties.
Going through the county-by-county results, several examples stuck out:
* Hamilton County, Ohio - Cincinnati was supposed to be a place where Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio and other Republican big wigs would make a difference; instead, Obama got almost exactly the same number of votes, while the GOP only mustered another 800. That gave Obama an almost 10,000 vote advantage in a key county.
* Cuyahoga County, Ohio - Obama lost 21,000 votes in this county that centers on Cleveland, but Republicans could not take advantage, as their own share of the vote dropped by 12,000.
* Franklin County, Ohio - In this county centered on the state capital of Columbus, Democrats expanded their 2008 margin of 100,000 votes to almost 115,000, as Romney actually got fewer votes than McCain did four years ago.
* Miami-Dade County, Florida - In 2008, Obama ran up the score in the Miami area by 140,000 over John McCain; in 2012, the Obama team squeezed even more out of that county, winning by 204,000 votes, as Romney received 41,000 fewer votes than McCain.
* Broward County, Florida - Why did President Obama stop in Fort Lauderdale on Sunday? He won Broward County by 253,000 votes four years ago, and his campaign team delivered another 253,000 vote victory on Tuesday in that South Florida county.
* Hillsborough County, Florida - Republicans probably didn't think that when they held their convention in Tampa that the county would reward them by more than tripling the Democratic victory margin. Obama won Hillsborough in 2008 by 10,000 votes; he won it Tuesday by almost 35,000.
There are certainly more examples in the fine print of the 2012 election results. But those six from Ohio and Florida bear out how the President's team not only did well in 2008, but they came back for more in 2012 - and that Romney failed to do better than McCain in several spots.
